


Snowpocalypse

by Sholio



Category: The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Cooking, Friendship, Gen, Snowed In, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-12 21:13:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16879281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: The forecast called for at least a foot of snow, and it was already ankle deep by the time Jessica ended up in a narrow side street in Hell's Kitchen, freezing her ass off and watching Matt fall off a fire escape.





	Snowpocalypse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilacsigil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/gifts).



The forecast called for at least a foot of snow, and it was already ankle deep by the time Jessica ended up in a narrow side street in Hell's Kitchen (what would have been an alley anywhere else, but Manhattan doesn't technically _have_ alleys, thank you Danny for this particular piece of useless information), freezing her ass off and watching Matt fall off a fire escape.

It was the first time she'd ever seen him fail to make a jump. She was used to watching him bound around like he was as superhuman as (most of) the rest of them, and by the time she realized he was going to fall, there was no time to catch him, even with her speed. She still tried, lunging forward in a giant leap that completely failed to result in any outcome other than Matt landing hard on the lightly snow-covered asphalt and Jessica rebounding painfully off the wall.

Matt lay there for a minute, Daredevil suit and all. Jessica picked herself up and brushed snow off her ass. "You better be okay." She leaned over him. "Hey. Matt?"

"I'm fine," Matt said, sounding dazed. Jessica sighed and whacked the back of her hand against his arm to let him know there was a hand for the taking here. He let her haul him to his feet. "I'm okay, really. Nothing wounded but my pride."

"Also your tailbone, from the way you're standing," Jessica said, and Matt tried to stand straighter.

"Matt!" Danny's voice echoed down from the rooftop. He was leaning over the edge, blond head outlined in a halo of falling snowflakes. The way he was leaning out, she was about to have a second one of them to catch in a minute. "Matt, you okay?"

Matt didn't answer immediately, so Jessica called up, "He says there's nothing hurt but his pride, but --" She took a sideways look at Matt, who was leaning on the wall. "... I have my doubts."

"Hang on, comin' down," Danny called, and before Jessica could point out that he had literally _just watched_ Matt fall off the ice-covered fire escape, and _what was wrong with both of you,_ he was already parkouring down the side of the building. He swung off the lowest fire escape one-handed and dropped to the pavement.

"Show off," Jessica muttered. Danny grinned a brilliant little-kid grin, completely unrepentant. "Where did Luke get off to, or is he base-jumping off the Empire State Building just to prove that lack of common sense is contagious around here?"

"He took the long way down," Danny said, turning to offer Matt a supportive arm, since Matt was starting to list sideways.

"Well, at least there's one sensible adult besides me around here."

"Yeah," Danny said, "I saw you jump off a moving garbage truck earlier tonight _onto a bus,_ so, no."

"It was a slow-moving bus." Jessica pulled her scarf more tightly around her neck as the snow picked up, stinging her cheeks, and gave Matt a critical stare. He seemed to be using Danny for more than a little bit of support, and his Daredevil suit was caked with melting snow, as were her jeans. She thought wistfully of bed and booze, not necessarily in that order. "Okay, guys, you know what? My fingers are frozen, and I'm done. All drug dealers and muggers with even the slightest amount of foresight have gone inside, and anyway, there's no one out to mug because everyone else is indoors too. I say we go home."

"Not gonna argue, but it might be a long walk," Luke said, joining them. "Looks like most of the city's transit is shut down because of the storm."

"The subways cannot possibly be shut down," Jessica declared. "They're underground."

Matt raised his head and took a step away from Danny, visibly pulling himself (and his sense of balance) back together. "Why don't we head back to my place and wait out the storm."

"Yay," Jessica said. "I mean, thanks. Lead on."

 

***

 

She'd rarely been in Matt's apartment, and usually at least one of them had been bleeding at the time. Granted, Matt was limping severely by the time they got there, and had given up trying not to lean on Danny. They were all shivering and even Danny's natural bounce had started to slow down, possibly because he, like the rest of them, was frozen solid. Jessica was pretty sure she could no longer feel her ears. There had been two stops along the way to help stranded motorists, in one case involving Luke freeing a stuck car by sheer main force. On the one hand, there was the warm glow of having saved random idiots from hypothermia; on the other hand, if some people just _had_ to have cars in Manhattan, why did they think it was a good idea to drive in this kind of frozen Arctic hell? She might have said that in so many words to the last one before Luke had dragged her off to resume the trek to Matt's apartment.

"You can change into dry clothes if you want," Matt said to no one in specific, leaning his shoulder on the wall as he slowly and painfully stripped off one piece at a time of the Daredevil suit. "If anything of mine fits you. I think I might take a hot shower." He raised his voice. "Jessica, what are you looking for?"

"I'm looking for booze," Jessica declared, opening another cabinet in the kitchen. "Don't tell me I'm a terrible houseguest, I know that, but I'll replace it and right now I'm about to bite somebody's head off if I have to go back out in that mess to get something to drink."

"Third cabinet from the right," Matt said. "And there's beer in the fridge. I'll be out of the shower soon."

He grabbed a first-aid kit on the way into the bathroom. 

"So," Danny said after a minute, "do we _help_ him, or ..."

Luke slung an arm around his shoulders. "Kid, we do like the man said and get into dry clothes."

"Like anything he owns is going to fit you," Jessica declared. She had finally found Matt's booze stash, and passed up the expensive-looking Scotch for the shitty bourbon, pouring herself a few fingers in a glass. It would be cheaper to replace and she wouldn't have to feel guilty about drinking it.

 

***

 

By the time Matt emerged from the bathroom, moving stiffly and clad in sweats, there were wet clothes draped all over the radiators. Jessica was on her second glass of bourbon (swimming in a sweatshirt of Matt's that Luke, as predicted, hadn't even been able to get over his head), and Luke and Danny had cracked open beers and were clanging around in the kitchen. 

"I think they're cooking," she said as Matt eased himself down onto the couch next to her. "Be afraid."

"Hey, I'm a very good cook!" Danny said from the kitchen. "... At least Colleen says so."

Jessica snorted. "You're sleeping with the woman, so of course she's going to say that."

"Sorry about making free with the facilities, man," Luke said over the sound of Danny indignantly getting out his phone and texting Colleen. "We figured you wouldn't mind if there was food at the end of it, that you didn't have to make. Nobody's gonna be delivering in this."

"And you would be right," Matt said, with a slight grin. From this angle, Jessica could see a bruise across the side of his face. He'd really gotten banged around, but then, she'd figured that. "What is it? Smells good."

"Great-Aunt Lulu's prize-winning spaghetti sauce," Luke said. "Give or take a few recipe substitutions."

"Aha," Danny declared. He flopped over the back of the couch and showed Jessica the phone screen. 

Colleen had texted back: _You're an excellent cook. The problem is actually getting you to cook._

Jessica pushed the phone out of her face. "You consider this a winning argument?"

Danny actually _ruffled her hair_ (she was gonna kill him) before getting hastily out of reach. "Matt, do you have any -- what was it you wanted, Luke? Pepperoncinis?"

"I don't really cook all that much," Matt said. "Check the upper shelves around the stove."

The results of their experiments were interesting, due to their attempts to guess at the contents of spice containers labeled only in Braille, but completely edible. Jessica had seconds. (Due entirely to her body's cranked-up metabolism in the cold, or so she would have said if anyone had asked, which no one did.)

Matt, for obviously reasons, didn't have a TV, which meant they ended up sitting around and quietly chatting as the snow sifted down outside. Danny and Luke started arguing about Star Wars (namely if the recent movies were as good as the old ones). Matt seemed amused; Jessica threw her arm over her face and wished _she'd_ been the one to fall off the fire escape on her head.

She took her arm away to find Danny over at the window, leaning against the glass with the neck of a beer bottle held loosely in his fingers. "Hey, it's really coming down out there."

Luke drifted over to look. Matt stayed where he was -- the view from the window was one thing he wouldn't really be able to appreciate, as such, and Jessica thought about hanging out on the couch out of solidarity, but eventually the desire to have a look won out. She got up and went to lean against the window beside Danny.

Down past the flashing neon, down in the bottom of the city's concrete and steel canyons, a deceptively soft-looking white blanket had covered the world, with snowflakes swirling down in a dense cloud to hide the city's scars. By morning it would be churned by passing cars into a brown soup, full of cigarette butts and filth. But tonight, it looked like some kind of goddamn picture postcard. A single set of tracks were visible -- some hapless pedestrian, off on some errand, filling in with snow even as she watched.

"It's beautiful," Danny said quietly, and with or without meaning to, he leaned his shoulder against Jessica's.

She scruffed up his hair, because two could play that game. Not that his hair could get any scruffier except possibly with the application of a weedwacker.

Also, he just looked happy, which wasn't really where she was going with that. (Or maybe it was. Kinda.)

"Hey, you guys spending the night?" Matt asked from the couch. He'd sprawled down to fill Jessica's vacated space, the jerk.

"Don't want to put you out," Luke said.

"It's no trouble," Matt said, sounding sleepy. "We'll have to figure out who goes where. The bed sleeps two."

"Dibs on the couch," Jessica promptly announced.

After some debating, they ended up with Matt and Luke in the bed and Danny on the floor, because he claimed that he was more comfortable that way, cue some story about sleeping on a rush mat on a stone floor for fifteen years in K'un Lun. Jessica had already decided that if anyone tried to give her the bed because of misguided chivalry, she was going to throw them out the window (she'd catch them if they were too squishy to land properly; it was the principle of the thing) but no one tried it.

She rolled up in a blanket on the couch, but lay awake, listening to the sound of faint snoring as the others drifted off to sleep, and trying to get used to the feeling of sleeping with other human beings in the room with her. It reminded her of sharing a room with Trish. Or falling asleep beside Luke ... but she wasn't going to think about that.

Damn this heightened metahuman metabolism; she'd had a bottle and a half of Matt's bourbon and she was still stone cold sober. She climbed out of bed and padded barefoot across Matt's cold floor to the kitchen. In the light of the neon sign, she checked the cabinet to check out the options, then decided to pass up the hard stuff for now, and got a beer out of the fridge.

She went and sat in the window for a while, and drank her beer, and watched the snow fall.

Stupid city.

Sometimes she didn't mind keeping an eye on it.

 

***

 

She woke in the morning, tangled in a blanket on the couch, to a warm frying smell that turned out to be Luke and Danny making (goddammit) pancakes. They were also both soaking wet.

"We went out to get syrup and ended up having a snowball fight on the roof," Danny explained.

Luke at least had the decency to look vaguely embarrassed about this.

Jessica decided magnanimously not to say anything as long as the pancakes were decent. And they were.


End file.
